Scribble Notes with SimpleText

Productivity Sauce

Nov 18, 2009 GMT

Dmitri Popov

Here is a genuinely useful Web-based application -- SimpleText. It is, indeed, a rather simple online note-taking application that is positively light on features. It doesn't offer any fancy text formatting tools, and you won't find any advanced sharing capabilities in it either. So what's so "genuinely useful" about it, then? Again, it's simplicity. I find it particularly useful for drafting articles and blog posts. It allows me to quickly jot down ideas, save useful links and text snippets without much fuss. Since I spend most of my time in Firefox, SimpleText is only a tab away, and I don't have to launch OpenOffice.org Writer or switch to another application.

To start using SimpleText, you don't even need to create a separate account: if you already have an account with Google, you can use your Google credentials to log into SimpleText. Despite it's simplicity, SimpleText offers two neat features: Revisions and Conflicts. The former lets you revert the file to any previous version, while the latter checks for conflicts (useful when you are editing the same note on several machines). SimpleText is open source and you can run it on your own server or using the Google App Engine platform.